Things Fall Apart
by Kealsey Aburame
Summary: We were all so fucked up-so, so, so fucked up. I don't know why we thought it could work. Two-shot.
1. Pickles

**A/N: I put way too much of Guns n Roses into Snakes n Barrels in this and that means it's at least a little painful. Hints of Tony/Pickles but nothing really explicit.**

**Cover picture from evilcreampuff on deviantart, it's the only thing happy about this.**

Tony spoke through his music. He really, truly did like no one else I knew. He was so inarticulate in interviews and real life. I spent so much time watching him stumble through the most basic ideas but I knew it was different from, like, Sammy or Nathan. Sammy and Nathan couldn't get their thoughts out through anything but Tony could. The words weren't there for him but the music was. That's why I was so hard on Tony. That's why things fell apart.

Tony was the reason I stayed in the apartment with him and Sammy. I mean, I liked Sammy fine, he was a decent drummer and he was shockingly _nice_ for an LA rocker but he wasn't what I was looking for. Tony was what I was looking for. Once I had Tony, I just had to fill in the rest of my band. No one else really wanted to be in a band like I did. Tony just wanted to speak in his native tongue and Sammy just wanted to show off his body and make some money without being a stripper and Bullets already had his time in the spotlight. But I wanted that band, really fucking bad and they just followed me.

That doesn't mean that I didn't like them. I fucking fell in love with them. They were my family. And there are a bunch of old interviews and home videos from the first tour where you can see how in love with them I was. The one that hurts the most one of the roadies took from the bus, me and Sammy were outside and Sammy had slung me over his shoulder, spinning me around. We were both laughing so hard that the camera could pick up my wheezing. Sammy set me down in front of Tony and I batted his hat off playfully, he picked me up and put me on his shoulders in retaliation. And that's what the whole first tour was like, a bunch of dumb kids messing around and accidently gaining fans in the process. It was another reason everything fell apart.

I miss everything from that tour but I think I miss that Sammy the most. He was like the cool older brother everyone wished they had to me. He was really dumb sometimes and he forgot things easily but he was so fucking affectionate that you didn't really care. Sammy's still nice, still that unusually nice guy who let me into his apartment when I first got here but he's not all here anymore. He forgets a lot of things now, not songs but other things like stupid jokes and what the apartment we shared looked like or what city we're in. Sammy's not the reason things fell apart though, I am. Me and my stupid attachment to Tony.

We fell apart and Bullets left and Sammy got even more fucked up and Tony started hating me because I can't understand Tony anymore. We got really famous, way too big for our own good. Because then we were swimming in cash and girls in the middle of LA and every numbing substance was available to us and we were all so fucked up on the inside that we took them because we needed it. Then Tony started drinking, not like the rest of us, but really _drinking. _I didn't care until I realized that he stopped plucking at his old acoustic guitar at night when we couldn't sleep or when he needed to say something. He stopped playing any music outside of shows. And that meant he stopped speaking to me.

So I started screaming at him. Screaming as loud and as viciously as I could, pretending that it was about the band and not about us. I'd tell him that he was playing like shit. I'd tell him that his drinking was way out of control. I'd tell him that he had a problem. I never said anything to Bullets who actually OD'd and had to go to rehab or Sammy who I hadn't seen sober in months. I just yelled at Tony because he was different. He was the reason we were here. And I hoped that maybe if I yelled loud enough he'd yell back and I'd finally be able to understand him. It wouldn't be his music but it wouldn't be a stumbling mess either. It'd just be Tony, even if he hated me.

I was so desperate to hear Tony again and really understand him that I'd tear my own band apart and make him hate me. And I did. I'm the reason that Bullets is gone and I'm the reason Sammy gets so fucked up and I'm the reason Tony is only barely still here. But I can't stop because I still haven't heard him since the first tour. And I'll keep trying until he's gone or I'm dead or he finally starts talking to me again.


	2. Tony

Seven years ago a kid stepped off a bus from Tomahawk Wisconsin to LA with a guitar case and a dumb hairstyle. He proudly introduced himself as "Pickles." I didn't believe it for a second but I decided to humor him. That might've been my biggest mistake.

Maybe if I asked his real name and called him by it there'd be a kid left for me to save now. But I didn't, I let the kid that came off that bus forget ever being anyone but Pickles. Me and Sammy just let him stumble into the club scene without an anchor. No girlfriend, no kid, no family he cared about, not even a fucking goal outside of the music. He just wanted to play rock n' roll and we let him drag us along.

When Pickles was still just that kid we were hardly a band. We all lived in Sammy's shitty apartment together and we all played music but we didn't really play together. Then Pickles found Bullets and we started playing together and I traded in my guitar for a bass because Pickles was in love with his Les Paul and suddenly we were a band. And that kid that breezed into our life was suddenly our leader—our frontman.

I planned to follow around some stupid punk from Wisconsin about as much as I planned to start fucking one. But when good things fall into your lap you learn to just take them. Pickles was a good frontman anyway—excited, charming, talented, pretty and passionate. He loved the music we made, he _believed_ in it like only a small-town kid could. All those things that Pickles had that made the band work in the beginning, ruined it in the end.

Pickles was too fucking naïve for LA. He was too impressionable, too eager, too driven. I never bothered to protect him, neither did Sammy. We were too used to him leading us around, we figured he knew what he was doing. Even when me and Pickles were more than bandmates—more than family—I still didn't protect him. That was my second mistake. I knew he was just a kid but he was so fucking sure of himself, he had to be fine. He wasn't. Underneath all that energy and passion was something fucked up, something empty and angry and broken. And the more wasted the rest of us got, the more that part of him came out.

That's why Bullets is gone now and why Sammy is too fucked up to realize how bad Pickles has gotten. That's why I'm waiting to really, truly hate him. So I can leave without my stomach feeling like it's free-falling and the rest of me is too heavy to move. Because right now there's still a part of that kid left in Pickles, still a part of whoever he was before LA and before us. I can see it when we're onstage. Even when we're fighting—the vicious, seething kind we do over my drinking or his control issues—we play like always. Pickles works the crowd and presses his back up against mine so it feels like that first night when he slid over my body and pressed his lips all over until he was content that I wasn't leaving. Now I know that I am. I just don't know when.

Once we're off the stage all of that energy and charm drains out of him. It's like he leaves a little bit of that kid on every stage and we've played so many shows now. And I can't stand that dead look in his eyes that he gets afterwards. So I corner him after the show and just grab him, pull him into my chest and hold him. We both tense for a moment and I wonder if he's going to do that spitfire thing that he always does with me but he doesn't. He buries his hands in my vest and clings to me like a little kid, sobbing furiously. We're not fighting but it feels almost as bad as fighting because he's crying and I'm drained. And we're both so _fucked_—over and up and any other kind.

I want to ask him his real name, finally because it feels like the last chance I'm going to get to save him. But it also feels like the last time I'm truly going to be able to break him. This is the last time he's ever going to show me any vulnerability. And I don't want him to break. We're all so broken already that I can't.

So I do nothing. And hope that it's the right answer.

**A/N: I'm kind of embarrassingly proud of this one.**


End file.
